The End (12A) |Close-Up Film Review

I will confess to a fascination with apocalyptic tales about the end of life as we know it and how what’s left of humanity deals with the situation.  

Anything from alien invasion, a plague of zombies and the aftermath of nuclear destruction or climate change.   But here’s something different – The End (of life as we know it) – the musical.  Well sort of.  Because a song and dance extravaganza this is not.  

The set up is interesting.  After an environmental disaster twenty five years earlier, a rich family and their small entourage retreated to a luxurious underground home they had created in a disused salt mine in advance of the situation.  We know them only by their roles – Father (Michael Shannon), Mother (Tilda Swinton) and Son (George MacKay), who has lived in this luxury bunker his entire life.  They have a butler (Tim McInnerny) to wait on them, a Doctor (Lennie James) to see to their medical needs and an old Friend (Bronagh Gallagher) from Mother’s ballet days, who also happens to be a good cook. 

They pass the time admiring their collection of art works and redecorating in tune with each new season – which presumably no longer exist in the outside world.   We never go outside the bunker to see.  Son also makes models of what he believes the world was like before the disaster and is helping Father, a former energy executive, write his autobiography in which he tries to justify the part he and his industry played in the destruction of the world.   No-one will ever read it so it’s a pointless exercise anyway.

But then the outside world does break in in the form of the Girl (Moses Ingram), who has somehow found her way into the labyrinthine salt mine.   At first they threaten her with guns – how many others have they repelled or even killed? – but she persuades them to let her stay, particularly when the Son takes a fancy to her.  She is after all the only female of his own age he has ever seen.  And her presence is a helpful catalyst for us to find out more about the characters and what makes them tick.

The “luxury apartment” set up looks a bit like a stage set and indeed the concept could well have been for a stage play.   Except for when the action goes into the salt mines part of the set, which is like a magnificent white cathedral   I wasn’t sure if it was salt or snow which had drifted in from the outside world – a world we never see.

The characters who most engage us are the Boy and the Girl.   Ingram in particular gives the whole story a bit more life and empathy.   But I did find the concept of this luxury bunker unconvincing. They grow their own food through some unspecified miracle of horticultural science, but surely after twenty odd years the Doctor’s supply of drugs would have run out or indeed by out of date?  After all, as Girl points out dryly over a gourmet dinner, the red wine’s gone off a bit.  There are some amusingly weird moments, like when the inmates all dress up in crazy homemade costumes and attempt a bit of vaudeville to celebrate yet another new year. 

And yes, as I mentioned at the beginning, this is a musical.   But South Pacific or indeed  Rocketman this ain’t.   The characters do occasionally burst into song (music by Marius De Vries and Josh Schmidt), but the musical numbers feel more like a chamber opera than what we normally would expect from a musical.   Apart that is from a rather interesting pas de deux staged in the white “cathedral” with Boy and Girl.   Impressive visually even though they are no Gene Kelly or Leslie Caron!  It’s the sort of musical though where you’re more likely to leave the theatre humming the scenery.   And the film iss also more than a tad too long to totally hold the attention.